44 Years of Debating the First Words Ever Spoken on the Moon

Perhaps
no recorded phrase has been so heavily analyzed, so dredged for
missing information, as Neil Armstrong’s words when he took his
first step on the Moon. In case you’ve been living under a rock for
the last 40-odd years, they were (drumroll), “One
small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Or
at least, that’s how they sound to most people. The uncertainty
arises over the fact that the phrase would make much more sense—would
make clearer the contrast between Armstrong’s first physical step on
the powdery moondust and the space program’s vast accomplishments—if
there were an article in there: specifically, an “a” before
“man.” For decades, people have said that Armstrong flubbed
his line,
while NASA maintained, at least at first, that the word is missing
from the mission recording “because of static.” Armstrong himself
said he’d been “misquoted.”

And
the controversy won’t die. Every few years, delightfully nerdy
posts go up at the linguistics blog Language Log, analyzing the
latest theories
as to what happened up there, on the recording, and in listeners’
minds to render this particular impression of those 10—or 11—words.
In 2006, the blog published
an exchange
with Armstrong’s biographer, who noted:

“You
should take into consideration…that Neil comes from northwestern
Ohio. I come from northeastern Indiana, only 60 miles from where Neil
grew up. There is a regional accent to consider. ‘For a’ is often
expressed is ‘foruh,’ virtually as one syllable. Personally, that
is my theory.”

“Every time we listen to speech and think we understand a sentence, we are performing a miraculous task”

This
week, that theory gained credence thanks to a
detailed linguistic study of Ohio accents
presented at the International Congress on Acoustics meeting in
Montreal. In the study, entitled “One small step for (a) man:
Function word reduction and acoustic ambiguity,” researchers
analyzed recordings of 40 Ohioans from near Armstrong’s hometown of
Wapakoneta speaking conversationally. Looking that the 191 instances
of “for a,” they found that indeed, the “a” in “for a”
tended to get swallowed by the speakers’ “r” sound. And when
“for” is spoken alone, the “r” is quite drawn out, to the
extent that “for” and “for a” often last for the same amount
of time. They conclude that it’s very likely that Armstrong thought,
and spoke, the words “for a,” but his accent rendered the phrase
so that to the ears of nearly everyone else, it sounded like “for.”

The
researchers point out, almost as an afterthought, that it’s amazing
that we aren’t uncertain about words more often. The fact that we
are able to dissect words and meaning from the flow of air we squeeze
out through a tube of exquisitely vibrating flesh is a testament to
the sophistication of our brains’ pattern recognition abilities.
“Every time we listen to speech and think we understand a sentence,
we are performing a miraculous task, which is to take what is
actually a continuous acoustic signal, break up that signal into
somewhat arbitrary parts, and map those parts to our memories of all
the words that we know in the language,” one of the researchers
said in a
prepared statement.
“We need only look at computer speech recognition and how it
succeeds and how it largely often fails to see how very difficult
that problem is.” This point raises the
possibility that if computers take on a bigger role in processing and
interpreting our communications in the future, as seems likely, then
linguistic uncertainty may only become a bigger problem in our lives.

And
Armstrong? According to his biographer, he finally said that he
preferred the historic quote to be rendered, “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” But while we know what he
meant to say as he took that small step, we may never know with certainty what words were actually
pronounced, in the messy spaces between speaker and listener, between
one accent and another.

Veronique Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Popular Science, and the sites of Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Follow her on Twitter here.